Your Story [uDG 2011]

I've been working on some tiles and a level to try it out in. I'm pleased with the results, but it's near half time so I'd have liked to have made more progress. It's exciting though; I'm enjoying working on this and seeing what everyone else is doing.

So I've been pretty quiet so far. I joined up with maximile a few weeks ago because it sounded like he basically wanted to make the same game as me and even more so because he can make art.

Anyway. I've been poking around at character controls in Chipmunk a bit and generating collision shapes for the levels. At this point I'm relatively happy with how it works and it's demo time! Also, maximile whipped up a nice little sprite for him.

random thoughts:
* Going from full screen to window and vice versa require me to recheck the window / screen to be able to use the controls again
* editor redraw issue: http://i.imgur.com/FOLG5.png
* not being able to see where to jump is a dick move. Seriously, leaps of faith for the lose. For the most part I found I could navigate where to go, and double jump sometimes saved me for jumps that felt obviously too long. But there were a few places where I could literally not see what was far enough. You would think "HEY BRIAN! YOU SHOULDN'T GO THAT WAY SINCE YOU CAN'T SEE THAT FAR", but my brain doesn't quite think that way

Hello,
The other day Scott sent me a build of the game.
It looks an feels great. The main characters animation is really cute.

About the only advice I had was that the backgrounds look really pretty, but if they had a little bit of color work done to them... they could look even prettier.
So I took a quick color pass on it when I had a little bit of free time.

This isn't quite perfect but maybe you guys will enjoy it? Feel free to snag any colors from it you like.

GREAT feel so far. I'd like the spread of the weapon to e a little more in the vertical, only because the levels seem to have a lot of little ups and downs, and I think it would feel a little more "fair" to the user if the bullets were sent out in a greater vertical swath.

I love how this entry is coming along! As others have mentioned, love the look and feel, and the little touches, like the particle effects or the slimes tracking you with their eyes, are really cool.

Some feedback:

- Horizontal movement speed of the main character feels a LITTLE slow to me.

- When double jumping up some walls, sometimes the guy will kick off and go away from the ledge. Most noticeable on the ledge right to the left of the big rock in the beginning. If it's intentional, it feels a little bit weird.

- It also feels weird to have the character slide down the low grade ramps when he lands on them.

- The slow rate of fire of the weapon gets to me (although this might just be me.) Perhaps ease the sting of it by either using an audio cue (a sound of cocking a shotgun, etc) so I can better feel out when I can shoot again? Or perhaps a meter a la Zero Suit Samus although that is probably a little clumsy.

- What you don't like the music? I spent HOURS searching for just the perfect song. What could possibly be wrong with my tastes? We haven't really discussed anything on music yet, but I can assure you we won't use that song.

- Horizontal speed is lowish to try and prevent him from jumping quite so far.

- I'm using Chipmunk to power the platformer physics as much as possible because we want to add more physics interaction later on in the game. The "kickback" is from hitting the corner of the line segment for the horizontal part of the ground. It should be much better for the next build.

- Sliding down ramps -- again because I'm trying to use the physics engine. I haven't really decided if I like it or not. What really bugs me is bouncing off corners because the player's collision shape is rounded. Not quite sure what to do about that yet.

-The weapon stuff is still pretty early. We still want to add another weapon type or two and the shotgun one will probably evolve a bit more.